ManicTime Tracks Your Work Day [Downloads]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/NtKmP9UTibQ/manictime-tracks-your-work-day

Windows only: ManicTime is a detailed time-tracking application for keeping tabs on where your workday goes. Get a handle on how you spend your time with tags, graphs, and reports.

If you were intrigued by previously reviewed RescueTime but were turned off by the idea of uploading all your data to the RescueTime servers, ManicTime offers a very similar set of tools but stores your data locally.

ManicTime runs as a background process and consumes very few resources. When open, ManicTime records which programs are open and what files they're accessing. Even if you never plugged any input into it, the app would do a very thorough job telling you when you were working and what you were working on. There are three primary timelines in ManicTime: the activity line shows whether you were idle or active, the application line shows which applications were in use, and the tag line is for user supplied information about the work at hand. You can tag both idle and active blocks of time by simply highlighting them and applying the tag.

The ability to tag idle time adds a great deal of functionality to the application: you can tag time spent in meetings, making phone calls, or even time logged at the gym. The tag system makes it easy to keep tabs on what work you're doing for different projects and clients—an especially handy feature for people who spend all their time using a similar set of applications for nearly every task at work. You can graph user specified blocks of time based on a variety of parameters like the basic active/idle cycles, by applications, or tags to see how your time! is spen t. ManicTime is freeware, Windows only.

ManicTime [via MakeUseOf]